Free speach or shouting fire?

February 10, 2010

I work a 9 to 5 like most night-schoolers. My job is a drag and my boss is a brainless nimrod. However, I want to get a PHD in cognitive psychology so I found a job that pays the bills and is close enough to home and school so that I can go to school at night. All this being true if I was having a $#!ty day and I had a blaring head ache and three papers due and leftovers waiting for me at home for supper. So because of all this when my boss comes over to me and tells me to redo three hours of work, because he was too stupid to figure out what he wanted the first time around. If I said “No you stupid F*&%ing Nimrod why don’t you try to wrap your tiny little brain around the work that you asked for originally and you’ll see that you can get the data you want without me doing this all again.” I’ll get fired simple as that. Even though I’m 100% right. And he is a F*&%ing nimrod. However there is a time and place for things even if I think I’m saying the truth.

So yes if I was Ward Churchill’s boss I would have fired him, he can think he is right for saying America deserved 9/11. For all intents and purposes he could be right, he still gets fired. It’s like Rex Ryan giving the finger, the guy deserved it but that doesn’t matter, sometimes you can’t just say whatever comes to mind even if your right like a radio shock jock. Oh, wait, they can’t either.

Yes, I would have fired him, but I would not have run an inquisition. First off it’s counterproductive, why give him a bigger stage? But the real reason is because you lose all credibility. It goes from firing a person for being an a$$ hole at the wrong time to the Salem witch trials. Now you’re just finding an excuse to fire someone you don’t like. You go from being in the right to climbing on this massive moral high horse that no one is going to fall for. Now instead of getting rid of some one, you gave the left their Bush.

Just like Ward was wrong to say what he did when he did, it was wrong for the University of Colorado to act like they did. There is a time and place for intellectual dissent; it is not at a tribunal. If you don’t approve of someone’s point of view you can debate him, a more public figure in a more public setting but debate with a logical back and forth, mudslinging is for monkeys.

The classroom is a perfect place for this. It is the teacher’s job to present knowledge to the best of his ability, while at the same time encouraging debate from both sides. That doesn’t mean a teacher cannot have an opinion, it just means the teacher has to understand just that it is an opinion and can be challenged. There was always a Plato and Aristotle, that doesn’t mean we have to turn them in to Tupac and Biggie.

Free speech or shouting fire in a theater? It wasn’t either one. It was pure stupidity, it was poking a sleeping bear, it was worse than that it was poking an injured lion. What happened to him isn’t another kink in our armor of free speech, it was what happens to everyone who does something insanely stupid, they get hurt.